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Gay voices of Cleveland echo through the decades and beyond the grave as Gay Games arrive

David Gauchat discusses the state of gay Cleveland

David Gauchat talked to The Plain Dealer 21 years ago about the state of gay Cleveland. Now, with Cleveland about to play host to the 2014 Gay Games, Gauchat says life is much better. He was photographed recently in downtown Cleveland at the War Memorial Fountain. Louis J. Katern, who died in the Battle of the Bulge, has his name inscribed there. Gauchat has learned the story of Katern, who was gay and dealt with such oppression he told his sister in a letter he wasn't sure he wanted to return to America after the war. (Lonnie Timmons III/The Plain Dealer)
(Lonnie Timmons III Plain Dealer)

Next week, the Gay Games come to Northeast Ohio – the highest-profile gay oriented event in the area's history.

For David Gauchat, the athletic events, top shelf entertainment and education seminars in Cleveland and Akron make for a special week and a special time. He plans on attending the opening ceremony at Quicken Loans Arena on Saturday, Aug. 9 as well as some of the other events.

The baker, caterer and travel guide has even been hired to make a birthday cake for one of the visiting French athletes.

In 1993, Gauchat, now 61, appeared on the cover of The Plain Dealer's Sunday magazine for an article entitled "Voices of Gay Cleveland." The story was described this way on the cover: "Coming out and openly proclaiming your sexuality is still the most powerful and divisive issue for gay men and women."

I wrote the story.

At the time I lived in an apartment across the street from Truffles, the bakery Gauchat owned at 112th and Clifton Boulevard for 10 years. I was a regular customer and we got to be friends. He was a smart, thoughtful and funny guy who wasn't afraid to give me a hard time about my weekly column or anything else I wrote.

When the Voices of Gay Cleveland idea came up, he agreed to be interviewed. It turned out to be a solid, (I thought) wide-ranging piece about gay life and culture in Cleveland.

Gauchat told me he cringed the first time he read the story the Sunday it published. He still felt the societal shame of his sexuality he had been brought up with and seeing it in print made it uncomfortably real. But after several more reads he came to take pride in speaking out about gay people who hid in the closet.

"I know it cost me a few customers at the bakery," he said. "Some of them didn't know I was gay and were shocked. Some didn't like me being so up front about it."

Gauchat grew up in Avon the youngest of six siblings. Parents Bill and Dorothy founded Our Lady of the Wayside, a home in Avon for the mentally and physically disabled. They were devout Catholics who put their faith into action.

When David was 25 his mother asked him if he was gay.

"I always believed it was wrong to lie to your parents," he said. "I knew this was life changing for me. But I wasn't going to lie."

The 1993 Sunday magazine piece was another coming out of sorts.

Flash forward 21 years. I got an email from Gauchat the weekend after the 50th anniversary of D-Day in June saying he wanted to share a letter with me that he'd received shortly after that 1993 magazine piece ran.

We'd run into each other over the years and talk about the old days of Truffles. In the intervening years I'd gotten married, moved to the suburbs and had a few kids. He'd sold the bakery and gotten into multiple endeavors including catering, landscaping and taking travel groups on vacations in France.

But I was curious about his email. What was this letter? And why bring it up now, two decades later? What did D-Day have to do with a story about gay Cleveland?

A letter from a different time

I drove to his house. He was still in the old near West Side neighborhood where we first met and living in his huge, purple ramshackle house that served as the nursery for his landscaping business. He had a copy of the Sunday magazine and the letter.

The letter was from a woman named Louise T. Ziehm. She had read my Sunday magazine piece and wanted to praise David for his participation in the story but also to tell him about her brother, Louis J. Katern.

The abbreviated handwritten letter is as follows:

Dear David:

This note is being written with deep admiration and utmost respect for you. It is through Michael Heaton's column about your lifestyle that has not only enlightened, but enabled me to finally understand what I have needed to know.

You see David, I had a brother who was gay, whose name was Sgt. Louis J. Katern that lost his life on January 18, 1945 in the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium- Luxembourg.

It still breaks my heart today to know how much he suffered by ridicule, name calling, discrimination etc.

Your contribution to this column has helped me enormously to truly understand his life.

My loving and only brother died a hero, who was awarded the Purple Heart posthumously, his name etched on the eastern quadrant of the War Memorial Fountain at the Mall on Public Square...

My brother was still so crushed by his rejection and ostracization of his way of life that in his last letter tome he requested that he not be brought back to the States in the event of his death!

He now lies buried in Grand Duchy Cemetery inHamm, Luxembourg. I am glad to see that this much maligned lifetstyle is finally being brought out and given its long overdue just place in this chaotic world . . .

Please do not consider my being daft for taking the liberty of writing a total stranger; it's because of my late brother that makes me feel a real special kinship.

Thanks for bearing with me.

Sincerely Yours,

Louise T. Ziehm

Mrs. Ziehm has since passed away.

Gauchat was visibly moved while reading the letter, even though he's re-read it several times over the last two decades. The 50th anniversary of D-Day made him consider again both that letter and the "Voices of Gay Cleveland" story.

"Reading about Louis Katern having such a bad time growing up gay in Cleveland that he wanted to be buried in a foreign land speaks volumes about what it must have been like," said Gauchat. "I thought about how awful it must have been in the late 1930s, early 1940s and after the war to be a gay man here. Or anywhere. It made me wonder if he would have come home at all even if he had survived the combat at the Battle of the Bulge."

The state of gay Cleveland – 21 years later

The central focus of the 1993 story was that some gay people in Cleveland still had a hard time coming out of the closet. Some men were married and led secret gay lives. Others were out in degrees, maybe out to their parents and friends but not at work, or the other way around.

What's changed since?

A lot, say Gauchat and others.

The gay community here and across the country has made great strides when it comes to civil rights and civil relations in general, Gauchat said.

"The younger gay people today have it so much easier than we did. There's not the social stigma there was when I was growing up," he said.

Gay marriage is being legalized in state after state. A federal Circuit Court recently struck down Virginia's same sex marriage ban. President Obama just signed into law a non-discrimination act regarding gay, lesbian and transgender people who work for the federal government. AIDS, once a death sentence, now can be a manageable disease. There's a new drug on the market, Truvada, used as a preventive measure against transmission of the AIDS virus.

Gauchat isn't alone in his assessment of profound change for gays in Northeast Ohio since 1993. Brynna Fish, an early gay rights activist involved in Cleveland Pride and other organizations, is also happy and hopeful about progress and positive changes that cross the political and social landscape.

"In my lifetime I never thought I'd see gay marriage or legal marijuana and at this point it's a probably a draw of which will come to Ohio first," said Fish, now a consultant.

"I was born in 1957, knew I was 'different' around age 8 or 9. I came out to my family after college in 1979 and became a founding member of Cleveland's LGBT synagogue, Chevrei Tikvah, in 1983.

"I was let go of my first job after college for being a lesbian. They didn't say that. And, while Ohio hasn't quite gotten there yet, our President signed an order making federal employees protected. A lot's changed."

The change for Fish has been personal as well as political.

"Twenty years ago my son asked me to take down a rainbow flag at our house after our porch was vandalized. Now those flags fly freely everywhere including Cleveland City Hall during Gay Pride week."

Martha Pontoni was featured in the 1993 story, as she'd recently been appointed by Mayor Mike White to the Cleveland Civilian Police Review Board – the first open lesbian to serve the city.

In that story, Pontoni offered that her appointment "marks the very beginning for higher visibility for gays in Cleveland."

Martha Pontoni in the early 1990s was the first open lesbian to serve the city, as a member of the Cleveland Civilian Police Review Board. She said then that her appointment "marks the very beginning for higher visibility for gays in Cleveland. Now, she says, "We are everywhere. And although we are still fighting we are also having fun." (Joshua Gunter/ The Plain Dealer)

Pontoni, now an education consultant currently working with Lubrizol, says that higher visibility has become a reality.

"Twenty years ago, it was all about coming out and visibility," she said. "Rarely were we seen in the media or included in any political discussion. As a community we didn't exist to others and even to ourselves. Separated by a river and gender, we hid. And those of us who were tired of hiding came out with a fury and an anger at those who kept us in the closet and those who chose to stay in the closet.

"Pride, Stonewall and other groups of the day were about visibility and justice," Pontoni continued. "It was hard work, it wasn't fun and games. Not in public anyway. Now we are everywhere. And although we are still fighting we are also having fun.

"I don't feel like as a community we are living lives of quiet desperation anymore, we have grown up and OUT. And I like it!"

In the 1993 story Gauchat lamented the fact that "Nobody stands up for gay people. You can still whip fag and get away with it."

Now?

"Today if you whip a fag, it's a hate crime," Gauchat said. "When you're out of the closet and you have the full faith of the government behind you, that's a really good feeling."

This year Gauchat, who lives alone and describes himself socially as a loner, plans on traveling to Europe to visit the grave of Louis J. Katern, the gay Cleveland man who died during the Battle of the Bulge.

"I'd like to think if he were alive today he might come back to Cleveland to see the Gay Games. And I think he'd be very proud of this city. I'm going to go see him this year and lay a dozen pink roses on his grave."

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